9 results for "History"

The trial of Henry Kissinger

Hitchens, Christopher
With the detention of Augusto Pinochet, and intense international pressure for the arrest of Slobodan Milosovic, the possibility of international law acting against tyrants around the world is emerging as a reality. In this incendiary book, Hitchens takes the floor as prosecuting counsel and mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambitions and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter. He investigates and reveals Kissingers' involvement in: the deliberate mass killings of civilian populations in Indochina; the deliberate collusion in mass murder and assassination in Bangladesh; the personal suborning and planning of a murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation that the USA was not war with - Chile; the incitement and enabling of a mass genocide in East Timor; and the personal involvement in the kidnap and murder of a journalist living in Washinton DC.
Verso 2001 159 pages

Love, poverty and war: journeys and essays

Hitchens, Christopher
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases the Hitchens' rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.
Atlantic Books 2021-05 475 pages

Thomas Paine's Rights of man

Hitchens, Christopher
Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted. But here, polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Hitchens, a political descendant of the great pamphleteer, demonstrates how Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States, and how, "in a time when both rights and reason are under attack," Thomas Paine's life and writing "will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend." (New Statesman)--From publisher description.
Atlantic Monthly Press 2006 158 pages

The Parthenon marbles: the case for reunification

Hitchens, Christopher
The Parthenon Marbles (formerly known as the Elgin Marbles), designed and executed by Pheidias to adorn the Parthenon, are perhaps the greatest of all classical sculptures. In 1801, Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Turkish government, had chunks of the frieze sawn off and shipped to England, where they were subsequently seized by Parliament and sold to the British Museum to help pay off Elgin's debts. This scandal, exacerbated by the inept handling of the sculptures by their self-appointed guardians, remains unresolved to this day. In his fierce, eloquent account of a shameful piece of British imperial history, Christopher Hitchens makes the moral, artistic, legal and political case for re-unifying the Parthenon frieze in Athens. The opening of the New Acropolis Museum emphatically trumps the British Museum's long-standing (if always questionable) objection that there is nowhere in Athens to house the Parthenon Marbles. With contributions by Nadine Gordimer and Professor Charalambos Bouras, The Parthenon Marbles will surely end all arguments about where these great treasures belong, and help bring a two-centuries-old disgrace to a just conclusion.
Verso 2008 161 pages

Hostage to history: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

Hitchens, Christopher
In a compelling study of great-power misconduct, Christopher Hitchens examines the events leading up to the partition of Cyprus and its legacy. He argues that the intervention of four major foreign powers, Turkey, Greece, Britain and the United States, turned a local dispute into a major disaster. In a new preface for this 1997 edition, Hitchens reviews the implications of the Republic of Cyprus.s applications for European union membership, the escalating regional arms race between Greece and Turkey, and last year.s Greek Cypriot protests along the partition border.
Verso 1997 178 pages